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For almost a year, Samantha Palmer’s phone home screen has been a picture of her son Jackson as a newborn. He’s tiny and delicate, with a full head of black hair, sleeping, wrapped in a blanket printed sparingly with rubber ducks. It’s the same picture that hangs in the Palmers’ living room in Dallas, the same picture she and her husband, Brett Palmer, gave to Jackson’s grandparents, and the same picture that’s displayed on Jackson’s gravestone after he died at 10 days old on July 31.

He’s now buried right next to a baby girl who died at 4 months and had, until his burial, lain in the cemetery alone without anyone by her side. “I remember seeing her face, and Sam and I looked at each other, and she goes, ‘Let’s give her a friend,’ ” Brett Palmer told me, adding that her picture on her grave site was what inspired him to add one to Jackson’s.

It’s a photo of a moment that never happened. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a picture of a moment that resides somewhere that’s not quite a memory but not quite fantasy either. The picture was photoshopped by Reddit user LukeMathew1960, the result of Palmer’s post in the r/PhotoshopRequest subreddit nearly a year ago, asking if anyone could remove the nasal cannula from Jackson’s face so they could see him “as God intended,” he explained.

Brett and Samantha never saw him like this: unobscured, healthy, seemingly at ease with the enormous work of keeping his heart beating. For the entirety of his short life at the neonatal intensive care unit, he had the cannula through his nose to facilitate his breathing and a feeding tube between his lips. Their pictures carry all those memories of him. In one, Brett Palmer is holding his son and smiling after the nurse said Jackson was recovering well. But the images also bring back “the chirping and the beeping,” the panic and urgency, and the toe-prick tests that made Jackson bruise and “squeal” with pain. “Seeing that face with all the cables and all the wires and all the things going on, it just kind of encompasses all of it and takes it right back,” he said.

Palmer’s post is just one of many on the subreddit from bereaved parents asking for medical equipment to be removed from their baby’s face. Some of the babies passed after hours, some longer. Occasionally, like the post from 31-year-old Jasmin Ferrante, who lost her daughter Ysa after five months, the requests mention wanting the photo for a memorial service. Ferrante told me she has also had the picture of her daughter’s face made into a sticker on her car.

On Facebook and Reddit combined, there are dozens of groups and threads dedicated to Photoshop requests. People post photos old and new, blurry and clear, and ask for edits ranging from “Please remove my ex” to “Give me long hair” to “Make this look like a professional headshot.” But for every 20 or so petty, goofy, or basic requests is one from a family or friend in mourning looking for closure or comfort or whatever peace comes from seeing someone who’s gone reimagined, sometimes after an age progression, sometimes with a set of angel wings, or sometimes in the company of someone who never got to say goodbye.

Others, like the Palmers and Ferrante, ask for something far simpler: a glimpse of what could have been. And with every request comes an unspoken plea for understanding, no matter how far into the land of make-believe they’re asking to be led.

But as Lilly Jay, a New York–based psychologist, points out, “imagination and the fantasy in grieving is not new. We have always had the capacity to imagine and create new stories about people who have died, whether it’s in a dream, in a memory, or in hearing from someone who’s gone.”

Similarly, postmortem photography is a long-established practice, beginning almost immediately following the commercialization of photography in 1839, Victorianist and University of Missouri professor Nancy West, the author of Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, told me. The practice fell out of favor by the early 20^th century, in part because of the reduced infant mortality rate. However, there are still services today that offer “remembrance” or “bereavement” portraits for parents with children who have died.

For these parents, access to others who’ve gone through the same tragedy is a lifeline and a rare occurrence outside designated support spaces. According to Jay, infant loss results in a form of disenfranchised grief. Unlike deaths with associated rituals, road maps, and standards, those that are disenfranchised are complex, underacknowledged, and often isolating.

“Part of what I hear from patients that is so painful is that their family and friends and community don’t really know how to talk about the baby, or they don’t think about the baby as a person who really existed,” she said. Having a picture, especially one that looks “normal,” helps those on the outside see the couple as grieving parents and their family unit as one that has been broken, one that will never be rendered in crayon, standing under a bright yellow sun, each stick figure labeled by pen in a teacher’s patient hand.

“Grief is really isolating, especially child loss, because very few people lose their children,” Ferrante told me, adding that her relationship with the father ended two months after Ysa’s funeral. “I felt really alone having to go through grief without my partner, but after reaching out, I learned that it is very common for this to happen.” Now her Reddit comment history is full of replies to posts about infant loss and avoidant partners, offering advice, support, and stories of her own experience.

“Some people go through this and it’s something that they really struggle with talking about,” Palmer told me. “Then, here I am, this stranger on a Reddit thread, and I have multitudes of people sending me words of encouragement or short stories about their life and how they got through it, someone telling me what it looks like a couple years from now.”

Both Palmer’s and Ferrante’s posts on r/PhotoshopRequest have received millions of views, thousands of upvotes, and more than 1,000 comments. One user told Palmer about how both their twins had died in their arms—one after 10 minutes, the other after 10 days. “I enjoy the grief because I loved them and it makes me feel so close to them,” the user wrote. “I can tell you that it’s a wound that will scab over in time, but will tear open from time to time.”

“I remember reading that, and it’s true,” Palmer said. “Because one day I’m good and we can talk like this, and then other days I wake up and it just hurts.”

Ferrante describes it as a wave you learn to swim against over time. It has been two years since Ysa’s death, and Ferrante continues to get condolence messages in response to her request. “I think a bereaved parent’s greatest fear is that their child will be forgotten,” she said. “The outpouring of love I received helped me to realize that her short time on this earth left an impact that could never be forgotten.”